Instructions for Falling In Love Again 

by Lucy Mitchell

What would you do if your late husband left you a list of instructions on how to fall in love with someone else?

Pippa Browning is faced with this exact dilemma, three years after the death of her husband, Dan.

Buried at the bottom of a drawer are a collection of notebooks full of Dan’s advice on how to live without him.

Pippa’s notebook is red and contains his instructions on how to fall in love again.

But Dan doesn’t just want Pippa to fall in love with anyone – Dan’s crazy suggestion is that Pippa should date his handsome friend, Mikey Stenton, a known thrill-seeking ladies’ man.

Reluctant to follow Dan’s advice, Pippa enters the world of dating. She embarks on a humorous journey of self-discovery, with the help of her children and two best friends.

It isn’t long before Pippa is finding it hard to ignore Dan’s instructions and Mikey Stenton.

Is Mikey really the man that everyone thinks him to be? Or was Dan right, and Mikey’s simply been misunderstood?

A heart-warming romantic comedy about motherhood, friendship and finding love, the second time around.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

I take a sharp intake of breath at the news of Mrs Gladson and the imminent birth of her fourth child. When I saw her a few months ago in the school playground, she’d ballooned overnight and had a look of terror etched across her face.

You come across as their friend. I prefer to act like I’m unhinged. Kids pick up on this stuff. It’s good for kids to live with a bit of fear…

Your children are feral. If they’re not escaping down ladders to go underage drinking, they’re cutting all their hair off at parties.

I’ve found myself in new territory. For the first time in my life, I’m frantically thinking of excuses to leave a woman’s house. ‘Got to go,’ I stammer, searching for the door. She kisses me again, sucking the air out of me like a giant hoover.

My Review:

This was a fun and witty read, penned with wickedly clever wry humor and sharply honed and double-edged levity while cast with a large slate of amusingly annoying and dysfunctional characters. Pippa was an impractical widow of three years and had been heedlessly turning a blind eye to the carefully planned budget her dying husband had painstakingly drawn up for her, as well as to the brattiness and emotional needs of her three challenging children who by that point had been labeled as “feral” by their grandmother, and were largely beyond Pippa’s weak attempts at control, although she didn’t seem to be expending much effort to rein them in.

Her departed husband had always been the responsible and organized parent while Pippa was largely an airy-fairy, ineffectual, and exceedingly lame parent as in many ways she was just as irresponsible as her monstrously mouthy and beastly children. She had avoided processing her grief by ignoring her dead husband’s instructions and spending lavishly and willy-nilly in redecorating her home and indulging in her passion for baking. She received an embarrassing wakeup call, which finally seemed to have rattled the little pea in her brain when her under-aged teenaged daughter was carted home in a drunken state while Pippa had assumed she was upstairs asleep. Oh my, major parenting fail.

Ms. Mitchell has hit a home run with her debut publication by serving up a crisp and breezy writing style with engaging storylines that were edgily amusing while also heart-squeezing and observantly emotive.   I wouldn’t want to live anywhere near this loud and obnoxious family, but I enjoyed being privy to their inner workings as Pippa began to find her way back to herself and her dead husband’s thoughtful plan for her. I also scored a fun and irreverent new addition to my Brit Word List with coffin dodger – which is UK slang for the elderly.